The Dragon's Lair

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Monday, 17 July 2017

This month James Gurney is proposing a challenge of painting a dead vehicle. So I chose this old loco that I always loved

Not the best easel ever as it was really improvised for lack of time.

I realise that, as expected, I have a problem because of my varifocal
glasses. They warp everything completely, when I look at my phone it
looks all curved, so this also deformed the drawing.
I can't use
my reading glasses to paint here because I won't be able to see the model
with them. I tried to stick to basic shapes. But I just realised now
that one of the wheels got lost in translation, it was there all the
time and then went off on a wander?

But there you go, the old
locomotive in a local museum. My friend who lives there was nice enough
to lend me her parasol to save me from the sun :) Not something I can fit on my bicycle otherwise... I used watersoluble neocolor crayons.

Tuesday, 7 February 2017

Currently trying to share instagram posts here so the blog lives a bit more. Sorry about the hashtags, I'll avoid them when I can.

This method should allow me to have my line art better visible while I paint. I could loose them entirely as I did in the test to the right, but I prefer the liveliness of the pencil lines to stay a bit. It's not faster but it might also allow me to start over faster if I mess up.

It can be a bit frustrating to have to halt a great project like this one but that's how things go. I am not going to complain that I have a job! The main problem is that I was finally getting some visibility but this is a constant effort to be made, the minute you disappear from social media you stop existing to others. I just hope that at least some of you will continue to follow this project but you'll have to be patient. And follow me on Instagram to get some glimpses into my daily work, art related but sometimes also culinary moments or outdoor inspirations.

In the meantime I wish you all the best for this new turn of the wheel, happy everything you are celebrating depending on where you live and your personal traditions.

Saturday, 3 September 2016

The process in a lot of my illustrations starts with a random background. I wanted to film a tutorial of this but for now I just can't find the time. Periscope is all nice but it implies always struggling to keep enough space on my phone and the end result is not really very good.

Anyway, basically it's about using several layers of acrylic paint, diluted to the consistency of a thin pancake batter. And about sloshing it about with various tools.

And very much like pancakes, the first one is always "for the pan" meaning it sticks and looks weird, you need to makes a series and things start to happen, fun effects and colour.

Odd mixes that can give interesting results

Depending on how dry the previous layer is it will produce different results

These are just bad iPhone photos but it gives an idea of the result

Sometimes you want to keep these as they are, maybe the could sell as abstract art, he, he. But I usually use them to paint other things on top, it gives me a first structure to work from, even if most of this will end up covered with more paint.

Since I don't have a lot of time to paint at the moment, I make a couple of these each evening and will keep going until I have a dozen or so. Then I will start to draw more thumbnails for the book and composing the illustrations before I get to paint them on these backgrounds.